Before you sign.
A vendor is pitching you AI. The demo was good. The real questions are what it costs in total, what work it actually removes, and when it pays you back.
For owners and operators being sold a platform they cannot fully evaluate.
Most buyers are not equipped to pressure-test an AI purchase, and that is not a failing. The vendor has run this conversation a thousand times. You are running it once. The gap is not intelligence, it is repetition, and it is the reason good operators sign contracts that never pay back.
Six things we examine before any signature.
Every AI purchase gets the same review, in writing, before the contract is signed.
The true cost.
Licenses, implementation, integration, training, and the people time nobody puts in the budget.
What disappears, and what appears.
Which work genuinely goes away, and which new work shows up to run the tool.
Who owns quality.
Who checks the output, and what happens when it is wrong.
Comparable evidence.
Businesses like yours, with results you can verify, not a slide of logos.
Integrations and governance.
How it connects to the systems you already run, and who controls the data.
Downside and exit.
What it costs to leave, and what you keep if you do.
If it cannot be explained simply, it is not ready to be purchased.
A written recommendation, and the questions to ask.
An evaluation guide built for your deal.
The questions to put to the vendor, the answer that should satisfy you, and the warning sign that should not. Written in plain language so anyone in the room can use it.
A decision scorecard.
The conditions that must all pass before a purchase is worth making, so the decision rests on evidence rather than on how convincing the demo was.
A recommendation you can act on.
Including what to buy instead when a smaller tool would do the same job for less.
In Brief 1, the review ended in a decision not to buy: no one could show what overhead the platform would remove, what it would really cost, or what it would add.
An established owner-led business was weighing a data activation platform from a credible company with a substantial client list. Rather than evaluate the product, we built a way to evaluate any product, and handed the owners a set of questions to take into the demonstration.
Read the brief →GET THE QUESTIONS
BEFORE THE MEETING.
Send us the proposal you are weighing. We will come back with what it will really cost, what it will really change, and whether the return is there.